AI, Ethics and Algos at Gluecon 2018

Great discussion at Gluecon this week in Colorado! Eric and Kim Norlin have created a great gathering of the minds that helps deeply technical people to come together and discover what’s happening in their industry. This year’s highlights for me were Adrian Cockcraft’s talk about “Chaos Architecture”, in which he unpacked how to build resilient systems, with examples of architectural design for AWS and Netflix and Lisa Kamm & Max Whitney talking about varieties of software devleopment lifecycles and finally Kris Nova of Heptio talking about containers, stateless engines and Kubernetes.

I led a breakout session entitled “Ethics and AI: Thinking about the Implications of Algorithmic Design within Semi-Autonomous Systems.” I discussed a number of computer vision and machine learning scenarios (and I also threw in some laughs at recent science-fiction work that pretends that AI is much more of a threat than it really is, given the current state of the art).

My session also provided a primer on basic concepts of ethical decision making and the distinction between legal activity and ethical activity, with some necessary considerations for algorithm designers, and a nod towards some future possibilities for tracing moral culpability within a system using blockchain or a similar technology.